THE CAMP COMMANDANT.
Roll-call in the morning was at ten; in the evening at 8.45; lights out at nine o’clock. I shared a hut with seven other officers, three of them aviators, who had all, like Lucifer, son of the morning, fallen to earth violently and from varying altitudes. On New Year’s Eve we blanketed our windows, kept lights burning, and at midnight drank a modest glass of port to the coming year.
Our scale of dietary not conducing to exuberance of spirits, or urging to violent exercises, most of the officers spent a considerable part of these short winter days in reading or in card-playing. As unofficial limner to the very cosmopolitan camp, my pencil was kept continually sharpened in effort to capture the varying characteristics of some seventeen different nationalities.
One day I found the Commandant looking over my shoulder. He was keenly interested, suggested that he might give me a sitting, and reverted several times to the question of price. Finally I hinted that while I could not dream of accepting monetary recompense, he could, if he cared to be so complaisant, connive at my escape by way of part payment!
No one, I believe, ever escaped from Carlsruhe Camp, though various efforts were made by tunnelling. To make exit by a more direct method three high palisades and barbed wire fences had to be scaled, and that in almost certain view of numerous sentries without and within. Sitting by the barbed wire in a remote part of the court, a Posten outside would open a little slit in the paling and turn upon me an eye which was alone visible, rolling round watchfully, and with much of the effect of the Eye Omnipotent with which we were awed in boyish days.
We saw and heard little of the life of the surrounding town. Now and then a housemaid would shake a cover or a cushion from a window in one of the overlooking houses, or the Hausfrau herself might gaze gloomily forth. One night after we had retired to bed, and certainly at an hour not far from midnight, we heard what appeared to be a quartette of girls singing outside in the street. We flung open the windows and listened with vast pleasure to a very beautiful rendering of what may have been an Easter hymn; possibly a more pagan chant to the Goddess of Love.
A GAME OF CARDS.